The Course of the Heart

by M. John Harrison

  “You’d better take your coat off. Sit down. I’ll make you some coffee. No, here, just push the cat off the chair. He knows he’s not supposed to be there.”

  It was an old cat, black and white, with dull, dry fur, and when I picked it up it was just a lot of bones and heat that weighed nothing. I set it down carefully on the carpet, but it jumped back on to my knee again immediately and began to dribble on my pullover. Another, younger animal was crouching on the windowsill, shifting its feet uncomfortably among the little intricate baskets of paper flowers as it stared out into the falling sleet, the empty garden.

  “Get down off there!” Pam called as she hung my coat up in the tiny hall.

  Both cats ignored her. She shrugged.

  “They act as if they own the place.” It smelled as if they did. “They were strays. I don’t know why I encouraged them.” Then, as though she were still talking about the cats:

  “How’s Lucas?”

  “He’s surprisingly well,” I said. “You ought to keep in touch with him, you know.”

  “I know.”

  She smiled briefly.

  “And how are you? I never see you.”

  “Not bad. Feeling my age.”

  “You don’t know the half of it yet,” she said. She stood in the kitchen doorway holding a tea towel in one hand and a cup in the other. “None of us do.” It was a familiar complaint. When she saw I was too preoccupied to listen, she went and banged things about in the sink. I heard water rushing into the kettle. While it filled up, she said something she knew I wouldn’t catch: then, turning off the tap:

  “Something’s going on in the Pleroma. Something new. I can feel it.”

  “Pam,” I said, “all that was over and done with twenty years ago.”

  * * *

  The fact is that even at the time I wasn’t at all sure what we had done. This will seem odd to you, I suppose, but all I remember now is a June evening drenched with the half-confectionery, half-corrupt smell of hawthorn blossoms. It was so thick we seemed to swim through it, through that and the hot evening light that poured between the hedgerows like transparent gold. I remember Yaxley because you don’t forget him easily. But what the three of us did under his guidance escapes me, as does its significance. There was, undoubtedly, some sort of loss: whether you described what was lost as “innocence” was very much up to you. Anyway, that was how it appeared to me: to call it “innocence” would be to beg too many questions.

  Lucas and Pam made a lot more of it from the very start. They took it to heart.

  And afterwards—perhaps two or three months afterwards, when it was plain that something had gone wrong, when things first started to pull out of shape—it was Pam and Lucas who convinced me to go and talk to Yaxley, whom we had promised never to contact again. They wanted to see if what we had done might somehow be reversed or annulled, what we’d lost bought back again.

  “I don’t think it works that way,” I warned them, but I could see they weren’t listening.

  “He’ll have to help us,” Lucas said.

  “Why did we ever do it?” Pam asked me.

  * * *

  I went down the next day. The train was crowded. Across the table from me in the other window seat, a tall black man looked round smilingly and cracked his knuckles. He had on an expensive brown silk suit. The seats outside us were occupied by two middle-aged women who were going to London for a week’s holiday. They chattered constantly about a previous visit: they had walked across Tower Bridge in the teeth of a gale, and afterwards eaten baked potatoes on the north bank, admiring a statue of a dolphin and a girl; they had visited Greenwich. On their last day it had been the zoo in Regent’s Park where, gazing diffidently into the little heated compartments of the reptile house, they were surprised by a Thailand water lizard with a skin, one of them said, “like a canvas bag”.

  She relished this description.

  “Just like an old green canvas bag,” she repeated. “Didn’t it make you feel funny?” she insisted. But her friend seemed bored. “What?”

  “That skin!”

  At this the black man leaned forward and said, “It only makes me feel sad.”

  His voice was low and pleasant. The women ignored him, so he appealed to me, “I couldn’t say why. Except that a lizard’s skin seems so shabby and ill-fitting.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one,” I said.

  “What if evolution were ideological after all?” he asked us. “With aesthetic goals?”

  The women received this so woodenly that he was forced to look out of the window; and although he smiled at me once or twice in a preparatory way, as if he would have liked to reopen the conversation, he never did.

  Later I went down the carriage to the lavatory, and then on to the buffet. While I was there the train stopped at Stevenage; when I returned to my seat I found that the women had moved to an empty table, and the negro had been replaced by a fat, red-faced man who looked like the older H. G. Wells and who slept painedly most of the way to London with his hands clasped across his stomach. He had littered the table with sandwich wrappers, plastic cups, an empty miniature of whisky, the pages of a newspaper. Just before the train pulled in, he woke up, glared at me suspiciously at this mess, and pushed something across to me.

  “Last bloke in the seat left this for you,” he said. He had a thick northern accent.

  It was a square of folded notepaper, on which had been written in a clear, delightfully even hand, “I couldn’t help noticing how you admired the birch trees. Birchwoods more than any others are meant to be seen by autumn light! It surprises them in a dance, a celebration of something which is, in a tree, akin to the animal. They dance even on cold still days when the air leaves them motionless: limbs like illuminated bone caught moving—or just ceasing to move—in a mauve smoke of twigs.”

  This was unsigned. I turned it over but nothing more was written there.

  I laughed.

  “Was he black?” I asked.

  “Aye, kid,” said the fat man: “He were.” He hauled himself to his feet and began, panting, to wrestle his luggage off the rack. “Black as fuck.”

  As the train crawled the last mile into London, I had seen three sheets of newspaper fluttering round the upper floors of an office block like butterflies courting a flower. The Pleroma demands of us a passion for the world which, however distortedly, reflects it.

  I still remember the intelligent eagerness of the negro’s smile—how he always had to talk about the world—the way his sharp-edged elegant cheekbones seemed, like tribal scars or a silk suit, to be more designed than organic.

  * * *

  Though he hated the British Museum, Yaxley had always lived one way or another in its shadow.

  I met him at the Tivoli Espresso Bar, where I knew he would be every afternoon. The weather that day was damp. He wore a thick, old-fashioned black overcoat; but from the way his wrists stuck out of the sleeves, long and fragile-looking and dirty, covered with sore grazes as though he had been fighting with some small animal, I suspected he had no jacket or shirt on underneath it. He looked older than he was, the top half of his body stooped bronchially, his lower jaw stubbled with gray. I sometimes wonder if this was as much a pretence—although of a different order—as the Church Times he always carried, folded carefully to display part of a headline, which none of us ever saw him open.

  At the Tivoli in those days they always had the radio on. Their coffee was watery and, like most espresso, too hot to taste of anything. Yaxley and I sat on stools by the window, resting our elbows on a counter littered with dirty cups and half-eaten sandwiches, and watched the pedestrians in Museum Street. After ten minutes a woman’s voice said clearly from behind us: “The fact is that the children just won’t try.”

  Yaxley jumped and looked round haggardly, as if he expected to have to answer this.

  “It’s the radio,” I reassured him.

  He stared at me the way you would stare at someone w
ho was mad, and it was some time before he went on with what he had been saying:

  “You knew what you were doing. You got what you wanted, and you weren’t tricked in any way.”

  “No,” I admitted.

  My eyes had begun to ache: Yaxley soon tired you out.

  “I can understand that,” I said. “That isn’t at issue. But I’d like to be able to reassure them somehow—”

  Yaxley wasn’t listening.

  It had come on to rain quite hard, driving the tourists—mainly Germans and Americans in Bloomsbury for the Museum—off the street. They all seemed to be wearing brand-new clothes. The Tivoli filled up quickly, and the air was soon heavy with the smell of wet coats. People trying to find seats constantly brushed our backs.

  “Excuse me, please,” they murmured. “Excuse me.” Yaxley became irritated almost immediately.

  “Dog muck,” he said loudly in a matter-of-fact voice. I think their politeness affected him much more than the disturbance itself. “Three generations of rabbits,” he jeered, as a whole family were forced to push past him one by one to get the table in the corner. None of them seemed to take offence, though they must have heard him. A drenched-looking woman in a purple coat came in, looked anxiously for an empty seat, and, when she couldn’t see one, hurried out again.

  “Mad bitch!” Yaxley called after her. “Get yourself reamed out.” He stared challengingly at the other customers.

  “I think it would be better if we talked in private,” I said. “What about your flat?”

  For twenty years he had lived in the same single room above the Atlantis Bookshop. He was reluctant to take me there, I could see, though it was only next door and I had been there before. At first he tried to pretend it would be difficult to get in.

  “The shop’s closed,” he said. “We’d have to use the other door.” Then he admitted:

  “I can’t go back there for an hour or two. I did something last night that means it may not be safe.”

  He grinned.

  “You know the sort of thing I mean,” he said.

  I couldn’t get him to explain further. The cuts on his wrists made me remember how panicky Pam and Lucas had been when I last spoke to them. All at once I was determined to see inside the room.

  “We could always talk in the Museum,” I suggested. Researching in the manuscript collection one afternoon a year before, he had turned a page of Jean de Wavrin’s Chroniques d’Angleterre—that oblique history no complete version of which is known—and come upon a miniature depicting in strange, unreal greens and blues the coronation procession of Richard Coeur de Lion.

  Part of it had moved; which part, he would never say.

  “Why, if it’s a coronation,” he had written almost plaintively to me at the time, “are these four men carrying a coffin? And who is walking there under the awning—with the bishops yet not a bishop?”

  After that he had avoided the building as much as possible, though he could always see its tall iron railings at the end of the street. He had begun, he told me, to doubt the authenticity of some of the items in the medieval collection. In fact he was frightened of them.

  “It would be quieter there,” I insisted.

  He sat hunched over the Church Times, staring into the street with his hands clamped violently together in front of him. I could see him thinking.

  “That fucking pile of shit!” he said eventually. He got to his feet.

  “Come on then. It’s probably cleared out by now anyway.” Rain dripped from the blue-and-gold front of the Atlantis. There was a faded notice, CLOSED FOR COMPLETE REFURBISHMENT. The window display had been taken down, but for the look of things they had left a few books on a shelf. I could make out, through the plate glass, W. B. Yeats’s The Trembling of the Veil—with its lyrical plea for intuited ritual “Hodos Chameliontos”—leaning up against Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. When I drew Yaxley’s attention to this accidental nexus, he only stared at me contemptuously.

  Inside, the shop smelled of cut timber, new plaster, paint, but this gave way on the stairs to an odor of cooking. Yaxley fumbled with his key. His bedsitter, which was quite large and on the top floor, had uncurtained sash windows on opposing walls. Nevertheless it didn’t seem well lit. From one window you could see the sodden facades of Museum Street, bright green deposits on the ledges, stucco scrolls and garlands gray with pigeon dung; out of the other, part of the blackened clock tower of St. George’s Bloomsbury, a reproduction of the tomb of Mausoleus lowering up against the racing clouds.

  “I once heard that clock strike twenty-one,” said Yaxley.

  “I can believe that,” I said, though I didn’t. “Do you think I could have some tea?”

  He was silent for a minute. Then he laughed.

  “I’m not going to help them,” he said. “You know that. I wouldn’t be allowed to. What you do in the Pleroma is irretrievable.”

  * * *

  “All that was over and done with twenty years ago, Pam.”

  “I know. I know that. But—”

  She stopped suddenly, and then went on in a muffled voice, “Will you just come here a minute? Just for a minute?”

  The house, like many in the Pennines, had been built right into the side of the valley. A near-vertical bank of earth, cut to accommodate it, was held back by a dry-stone revetment twenty or thirty feet high, black with damp even in the middle of July, dusted with lichen and tufted with ferns like a cliff. Throughout the winter months, water streamed down the revetment day after day and, collecting in a stone trough underneath, made a sound like a tap left running in the night. Along the back of the house ran a passage hardly two feet wide, full of broken roof slates and other rubbish.

  “You’re all right,” I told Pam, who was staring, puzzled, into the gathering dark, her head on one side and the tea towel held up to her mouth as if she thought she was going to be sick.

  “It knows who we are,” she whispered. “Despite the precautions, it always remembers us.”

  She shuddered, pulled herself away from the window, and began pouring water into the coffee filter so clumsily that I put my arm round her shoulders and said, “Look, you’d better go and sit down before you scald yourself. I’ll finish this, and then you can tell me what’s the matter.”

  She hesitated.

  “Come on,” I encouraged her. “All right?”

  “All right.”

  She went into the living room and sat down. One of the cats ran into the kitchen and looked up at me expectantly. “Don’t let them have milk,” she called. “They got some this morning, and anyway it only gives them diarrhea.”

  “How are you feeling?” I asked. “In yourself, I mean?”

  “About how you’d expect.”

  She had taken some propranolol for the migraine, she said, but it never seemed to help much. “It shortens the headaches, I suppose.” As a side-effect, though, it made her so tired. “It slows my heartbeat down. I can feel it slow right down.” She watched the steam rising from her coffee cup, first slowly and then with a rapid plaiting motion as it was caught by some tiny draught. Eddies form and break on the surface of a deep, smooth river. A slow coil, a sudden whirl. What was tranquil is revealed as a mass of complications that can be resolved only as motion.

  I remembered when I had first met her:

  She was twenty then, a small, excitable, attractive girl who wore moss-colored jersey dresses to show off her waist and hips. Later, fear coarsened her. With the divorce a few gray streaks appeared in her astonishing red hair, and she chopped it raggedly off and dyed it black. She drew in on herself. Her body broadened into a kind of dogged, muscular heaviness. Even her hands and feet seemed to become bigger.

  “You’re old before you know it,” she would say. “Before you know it.”

  Separated from Lucas she was easily chafed by her surroundings; moved every six months or so, although never very far, and always to the same sort of dilapidated, drearily furnished cottage, so
you suspected she was looking for precisely the things that made her nervous and ill; and tried to keep down to fifty cigarettes a day.

  “Why did Yaxley never help us?” she asked me. “You must know.”

  * * *

  Yaxley fished two cups out of a plastic washing-up bowl and put tea bags in them.

  “Don’t tell me you’re frightened too!” he said. “I expected more from you.”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t sure whether I was afraid or not. I’m not sure today. The tea, when it came, had a distinctly greasy aftertaste, as if somehow he had fried it. I made myself drink it while Yaxley watched me cynically.

  “You ought to sit down,” he said. “You’re worn out.”

  When I refused, he shrugged and went on as if we were still at the Tivoli:

  “Nobody tricked them, or tried to pretend it would be easy. If you get anything out of an experiment like that, it’s by keeping your head and taking your chance. If you try to move cautiously, you may never be allowed to move at all.”

  He looked thoughtful.

  “I’ve seen what happens to people who lose their nerve.”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “They were hardly recognizable, some of them.” I put the teacup down.

  “I don’t want to know,” I said.

  “I bet you don’t.”

  He smiled to himself.

  “Oh, they were still alive,” he said softly, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “You talked us into this,” I reminded him. “You talked yourselves into it.”

  Most of the light from Museum Street was absorbed as soon as it entered the room, by the dull green wallpaper and sticky-looking yellow veneer of the furniture. The rest leaked eventually into the litter on the floor, pages of crumpled and partly burned typescript, hair clippings, broken chalks which had been used the night before to draw something on the flaking lino: among this stuff, it died. Though I knew Yaxley was playing some sort of game with me, I couldn’t see what it was. I couldn’t make the effort, so in the end he had to make it for me. He waited until I got ready to leave.

  “You’ll get sick of all this mess one day,” I said from the door of the bedsit.